Rory Byrne working on Ferrari's 2014 challenger

photo courtesy www.wikipedia.com

What Adrian Newey did for Williams, Mclaren and Red Bull, Rory Byrne has done for Toleman / Benetton and Ferrari. He designed all the cars that took Michael Schumacher to his seven world championships. Without any formal training in automobile design he was an industrial chemist by qualification. He started designing formula 1 cars in 1981 and went on till 2006 when he retired from Ferrari, but stayed on as a consultant for their road car division. He is the third most successful designer, after his rivals Adrian Newey and Colin Chapman.




With the regulations changing so drastically in 2014 and teams having to design new cars from the ground up to accommodate the smaller V6 engines with their turbo chargers, all the big teams are running parallel design teams to work on their 2013 and 2014 challengers.

Rory Byrne was spotted at the launch of the F138, and it was later confirmed by sources at Ferrari that he is providing "operational support" on thte 2014 F1 project.

German publication Auto, Motor und Sport reported Rory as saying he was "working full steam" on the 2014 car and the work involved in the F138 looked like "childs play" in comparison to it. Nicolas Tombazis is the design head at Ferrari at the moment, and Rory is working closely with him and Fabio Montecchi who is the lead on the 2014 cars design.